Whining about wine-ing? —

Linux players complain of illegitimate Diablo III bans (updated)

Blizzard says bans are only for those caught cheating.

UPDATE: A Blizzard representative said that claims that Wine is leading to Diablo III account bans are "not true" and provided the following statement to Ars Technica:

Playing the game on Linux (although not officially supported) and/or using Wine will not result in being banned, but cheating will. We’ve extensively tested various scenarios related to this situation, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly, and have not found any situations where players were banned solely for using Linux or Wine.

ORIGINAL STORY: Is playing games on Linux a crime now? That's what a number of Diablo III players are asking after reportedly facing permanent account bans for trying to run the game on an unsupported operating system.

A number of Linux users running the game through the Wine compatibility utility started complaining about abrupt account bans on the WineHQ forums a few weeks ago, before gaining widespread attention on Blizzard's official forums last night. The players suggest that Blizzard's cheat-detecting algorithms have overzealously branded Wine as an unauthorized third-party game modification tool, marking them as cheaters and erasing the legitimately earned progress on their account.

Some players have reported getting little help from customer service as they try to get account status resolved, even though other customer service reps reportedly assured users that running an unmodified game client through Linux was OK.

But Blizzard community manager Bashiok weighed in on the thread soon after it started, insisting that the complaining players were not banned just because they were using Linux.

We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.

Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned—cheating will.

We've reached out to Blizzard to try to get more information on the situation. In the meantime, Linux users might want to consider just running the game on a Windows partition for now.

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl